Down by the River and Easter

As promised, here are some images from Easter weekend (I know you've been waiting with bated breath).

My favorite egg had the barn on it.

 

It seems like the only time we use our green table cloth is Easter weekend, because it works so much more efficiently than newspaper to keep the egg dye off of the table! And because it is used so infrequently, the kids are always suitable impressed when we pull it out.

 

(kids being impressed by the tablecloth)

Everyone got to decorate three eggs. While it maybe hard to tell in this picture, Elora's were quite elaborate and fancy; she was very proud of herself.

 

On Saturday morning, we went to the egg hunt in Faith. As usual, it was a bit cold, but it wasn't nearly as freezing as the last two years. A groundskeeper had decided to spray the park with pesticide the night before the egg hunt, so they had to move the event to the nearby school; luckily, the school is just across the street from the park, so we could see everyone there and we weren't too late!

As usual, Eli and Jonah were in one hunt, and Elora and Joshua got to be in one for the older kids. (There was also a category for 9-12 yr olds).

Everyone did pretty good, considering how many kids were there. Eli even got one egg with two quarters inside!

 

So you see that girl behind Joshua and Elora? I have no idea who that is...but she was very mad about not finding many eggs. Seriously, she's in the background of most of the pictures I took of them, and she is folding her arms and pouting out her lip in most of them. Awww, wee lamb.

 

We also found Easter treats in our living room Easter morning, but I don't want to embarrass everyone by showing their scandalous pajamas.

 

The Monday after Easter was the extent of our Spring break, and we decided to celebrate by driving down to the Cheyenne river for our first picnic of the year, just as we did last year. Luckily, the weather was suitable for our plans.

Every time we go, the shoreline is slightly different ('cause you know, it's a river) and this time was definitely one of the most interesting displays we'd seen, with water where there isn't any usually, and other spots that are usually covered by water that were now exposed and glistening.

 

 

 We all enjoyed walking along the edges of the Cheyenne, and while initially the rule was not to go near the wet stuff at all, I soon relented in the case of Elora and Joshua.

 

 

Mostly because I wanted to walk along the sandbars too, and I knew they would follow me! Luckily, Joseph was keeping Jonah and Eli near him at this point, so I didn't have to worry about them falling in.

This was more interesting than the usual smooth edges of the winding river. So you see those people way, way behind us? They were rock hunters, looking for valuable rock specimens (Joseph talked to them). This wasn't anything unusual, since we always look for rocks and fossils when we are here, and we've found many interesting things in the past. In fact some friends of ours regularly visit this site because they like to collect beautiful and unusual rocks with which to decorate their yard, and they've been doing so for years.

Here are some rocks Elora found:

 

 

 

 After a few hours, it was time for us to go. As we trudged back to where our car was parked, we crossed paths with a man with a badge, a man whom Joseph knew. The man saw our kids with their arms full of rocks, and told us we weren't allowed to take rocks from that site. Wha..? This seemed especially odd because when we had first arrived, another official looking man had driven by us in a truck, and asked if we were with the rock hunters, whom he had obviously talked to before letting them continue on to the river, and that man had told us to have fun.
Hmm.
This second man who stopped us was Native American, so I piped up and said I thought this area wasn't on the Reservation...as everyone knows you can't collect artifacts on reservations, even though I don't think regular rocks count as artifacts. He informed us that one side of the bridge was on the reservation- the side without rocks, where nobody was. The other side was designated as Federal land. He told us that the government had stopped enforcing the "no collecting" law in the nineties, but that his organization through the tribe had been given authorization to enforce it.
In fact, he was down there because they'd been watching all the rock hunters through binoculars, while they sat up on a ridge nearby and staked out the place. For some reason, I found this all incredibly irritating. I guess this comes from being the daughter of a treasure hunter, and a lifelong rock collector. I asked if that law really applied to rocks , as we weren't picking up arrowheads or anything, and any fossils we had were just seashells in rock.
He insisted that these were still "paleo-artifacts" and that if people had big containers of rocks, they had to search them because they might hide arrowheads among their finds. Because he knew Joseph, he said, he wasn't going to go through our things, but we needed to leave all our stuff.
So we dumped most of our rocks along the trail as we headed back to our car, despite the sad faces of our kids. I still think the whole thing was a little fishy.
And while we had fun, the end of our trip left something of a bad taste in my mouth. 

 

 

 

 

 



These were some cool trees growing nearby